


Five O'Clock Shadow

by Mickleditch



Category: Whose Line Is It Anyway? RPF
Genre: 1980s, Anal Sex, Comfort Sex, Introspection, Language, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Prescription Drugs, RPS - Freeform, Rare Pairings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-16
Updated: 2010-09-16
Packaged: 2017-10-11 21:46:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/117455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mickleditch/pseuds/Mickleditch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Autumn 1989. Who's taking advantage of who? Does it really matter?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Tony Slattery moved house in the first week of October, after it had been raining for eight days straight, and he had spent an hour one Sunday afternoon lying on his back in the middle of his living room floor, trying to work out from the noises exactly what it was that the downstairs neighbours were doing. Whether it was the logical conclusion he had come to - that two rhinoceroses were making love on a trampoline, while an epileptic chimpanzee wearing a crash helmet tried to head butt a hole in the back wall of the building - or the fact that he had ignored his telephone four times in the process that bothered him more, he wasn't certain. Sundays in the flat always seemed to be the worst culprits at provoking the familiar sort of bleak apathy that rose in him every so often. At those times, he felt masochistic relief if there was a taping scheduled, to propel him out of the door, force him to draw on his energy reserves and accept that most of it was going to end up edited into oblivion, and ignore himself for three hours in favour of the other contestants as they frantically tried to pick up on each others cues. Don't look hung over, don't laugh _too_ much, watch for the camera and react, Oh, God, there's only one thing that rhymes with that line and it's dirty; a panicky, farcical adrenaline rush that carried him through the show and usually through a few rounds of drinks at a pub or club afterwards, and drained away when he got home to leave him utterly exhausted and oddly calm, no thoughts from anywhere inside or outside his head.

The house in Stockwell was a deep, narrow red brick Victorian, with a large bay window looking out over the road, and was what Tony's mother would have once described as 'out of our league'. It had been converted into flats sometime during the early seventies, according to the woman from the estate agents, whom Tony followed around the first floor, saying things like, "Oh?" and, "How lovely," at polite intervals, while wondering how he was going to get the bed up the stairs. He decided to sleep in the east facing room, the nowhere-to-hide lightness of it being something he not so much wanted, as felt he needed for the time being. It took care and ingenuity, but he'd come out of this sort of slump before, and he'd come out of it again if it killed him.

Obediently, he shifted his attention back to the estate agent, who seemed to have come to a temporary halt in her patter. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"

The woman looked ever so slightly peeved. "The second bedroom," she repeated, "is on the small side. Will you be living alone, or with a family?"

Tony summoned up his most charming, winsome smile for her, flicking the public pretence at normality on like a switch. "Quite alone."

He moved in in the middle of the week, and stayed up quite late, unpacking, hanging clothes, sorting through books that he couldn't remember buying and looking for ones that he couldn't remember loaning, opening boxes and trying to work out how he'd accumulated so many things he didn't need. What was the rule of thumb supposed to be? If you didn't love it, or need it, it was rubbish. It seemed as if there had been a lot of rubbish in his life over the years.

When he had finished, he dosed himself with benzodiazepines and went to bed for two days.

*** *** ***

Tony forgot Josie's copy of _The Pillars of the Earth_ that he'd borrowed five tapings ago, even though he did remember most of her cassettes. She rolled her eyes at him when they met up in the green room before the afternoon run-through.

"One day, I'm going to walk through your front door when you least expect it and take back every single thing that you've ever pilfered. That should leave you with no music, no videos, and about half a house."

"Please do. I'm always happy when friends turn up. And I'm usually naked."

"Sod." She grinned, heading for the coffee machine.

Greg, the sharp, witty American who had joined them this series and who was completing the line-up again today would probably be the last to arrive, his hotel being practically the other side of London. Whoever had been in charge of organizing his stay, Tony thought, had a few questions to answer. He made his way over to where John was already sitting, chewing unconsciously on a thumbnail, engrossed in Anthony Burgess. "Hello," he said, bending over and cricking his neck to look at the cover.

John tilted the book for him - _Napoleon Symphony_. "Less about Napoleon than about Burgess writing a novel. While I'm in the business, though..." He shrugged, a faint frown appearing. "It just cheapens it all throwing so much into such a short narrative, especially the war scenes. Like six people on stage in uniform pretending to be a battle." Shaking his head slightly, he broke off. "Sorry, off already. Rambling. Boring bugger."

"No, go on, ramble, please. I'm interested." Tony pulled up a chair alongside and sat, folding his arms and leaning back, wondering if it would look ignorant to close his eyes as well and unsure why he really cared. He was in the mood for listening, not talking. It would change, when his brain turned itself the right way around again, with the light on the outside and the dark tucked safely away on the inside, but for now, articulating himself seemed like an effort, and he felt no guilt whatsoever about putting it off as long as possible. And his intrigue with John himself, more than any book, was still, barely, able to permeate his mood, in the way that he found it difficult not to be at least slightly intrigued with someone when he'd realized a while ago that they were attracted to him - physically, at least - and in the abstruse way of being drawn in strange, transient moments to something within another person that he couldn't define or categorize. Something that he recognized in himself, perhaps. How bloody Freudian.

"I'll save it." John mimed drawing a zip across his mouth. He paused, looking lost in thought, staring at the book. "Fucking hypocrite."

"Anthony Burgess? That's being a bit harsh."

"No. Someone who criticizes him, then walks on stage and tries to be a battle."

Tony digested this. "It isn't any different than coming on and doing a penis joke when it comes down to it, is it?" he said, after some thought.

A slightly wan, lopsided smile appeared, starting to disappear just as quickly, as if it made its owner feel exposed. "Napoleon should try making penis jokes?"

"No, I mean that nobody can really do anything except what makes them laugh themselves, can they? Or it falls flat on its face. To use the old saw, try to please everyone, and you end up pleasing no-one." Tony had an indistinct feeling that his own words had somehow done him an injury. He went over them in his head, one by one, searching for the villain, but drew a frustrated blank.

"Least of all yourself," John said. It wasn't clear whether he was talking, or simply thinking aloud. Abruptly, he closed the book and handed it to Tony. "Borrow it. Get it out of my life for a month."

"There's optimism," Josie commented, "and then there's pure fantasy."

"Did you tell Dan about the infection before or after you shagged him?" Tony said, pleasantly, and ducked the swipe she took at him with a magazine as she walked past. As he traced the lettering on the book's dust jacket with his finger, it occurred to him that he had no idea when he'd be working with John again. "I'll bring it round when I've finished it," he said. "Where are you now? Wimbledon?"

"Putney." John hesitated for a moment, then reached forward and began searching through the various newspapers and empty cups littering the table in front of them. Eventually, he turned up a pen, and tore a sparsely printed column from the back page of a _Guardian_ , folding it twice and writing a quick address. "Go up the steps; it's the maisonette. Just put the book through the door if I'm out. And leave, _quickly_ , if you see a bloke from downstairs who looks a bit like Leo McKern - his art of conversation's capable of giving most people a brain haemorrhage within three sentences."

"I do hope that you're in, then," Tony said, and thought he might have sounded too enthusiastic as he caught the quick, uneasy glance of someone who was hoping that he wouldn't overstay his welcome. There it was again, that intrigue, the impression of being drawn in only to find himself shut out. It was as stimulating as it was engrossing. Mental eroticism, perhaps. _Well, that's certainly a new phase for you._ He'd read up on it one day, maybe, or talk about it over a nice alcoholic little dinner with friends. When he felt ready to be sparkling company again.

To his surprise, he thought that he was beginning to understand a small part of John perfectly. Suffocated in an empty house, and isolated in a room full of people.

*** *** ***

The GQ interviewer had a laugh that wanted to be horsey, but didn't quite have the stamina, and wore a fitted black jumper that did nothing to hide either her superb breasts or her dandruff. Tony liked her well enough, and after a while, she came to the end of the standard questions about _Whose Line, Saturday Night at the Movies_ and how he got from a council estate to Cambridge, and he made them coffee while she asked about music and restaurants. And sex, of course. Did he have a girlfriend?

The tinny sound of her tape recorder changed slightly in pitch as it faltered and then picked up again, and another peculiar watery gurgle came from the bathroom, where the photographer had been ensconced for the last ten minutes. Tony had a vision of opening the door to find that he'd flushed himself down the toilet without a trace. "Well, it's all relative, isn't it? You meet people who say they've got a girlfriend or a boyfriend who they hardly ever see. And then other people sleep together and say they're just friends."

"So which kind of person do you class yourself as?"

"Well, that's always subject to change."

"Under what conditions?"

"What I'm doing, and who I'm doing it with."

"You know, you have quite a bit of a reputation -"

"Oh, perish the thought..!"

The interviewer smiled, and it reached her eyes. "- for avoiding this type of question." Placing her cup down on the coffee table, she moved the recorder closer to her, and let her neatly manicured finger hover above the on/off switch. "Look, if this makes you uncomfortable..." she said, letting the rest of the sentence hang.

Tony looked at the little machine, whirring quietly. The afternoon silence of the flat, broken only by the gentle mechanical sound, began to seem tangible again, a physical presence larger than any of the three people in it. "It doesn't. It's all right."

"Are you gay?" She came right out with it, but not in an accusing way, as if promising him that if he gave her the confidence now, she would reward him with discretion; support, even.

"I can't answer that."

"But you're not straight?" she prompted.

"I can't answer that either."

"Wouldn't it be easier to say you're bisexual, then?"

"Everything's easier when you can put a label on it, isn't it? Wouldn't it be nice if we were all tins of baked beans? Jars of marmalade. Something like that."

She let the recorder rest, reaching for her coffee again. "Have you never lived with anyone?"

Tony tried to interpret whether or not this was part of the same question, or an entirely different topic. "No, I haven't."

"That must be lonely sometimes."

"I suppose so. But there are two different hells to choose between - not having someone there when you want them, or having them there when you want more than anything to be alone. I make my own bed, so I ought to just lie in it."

The interviewer cocked her head slightly. "That sounds so final. Haven't you ever thought about getting out again and starting over?"

She was a nice girl. After she had gone, the photographer trailing unsteadily behind her, Tony wished that she hadn't been, so he could have simply told her to fuck off; so he could forget everything that she had said, rather than let it become one more internal monologue, flapping directionlessly around inside his brain like a moth. He contemplated trying to read for a while, but decided instead to return the last message that his agent had left. Halfway to the telephone, though, he stopped, picking up _Napoleon Symphony_ from the shelf where it was still lying next to his keys and thumbing it open.

He only realized that he had been standing there for some time when he looked up and noticed that the light had faded and the room was now painted in sepia.

*** *** ***

"You should book yourself into Champneys for a week," Jan, Tony's agent, told him, punctuating her sentence with hurried stabs at the remains of her avocado salad. They had been having lunch at The Ivy in second sitting, the less popular hour where, apparently as a charitable gesture by the management to the general riff-raff of London, you could book first thing in the morning to eat in the afternoon if you didn't mind queuing, pub-fashion, at the bar beforehand. "Or... what's the name of that place in Surrey? Where Richard Madeley always goes. Grayshott," she finished, waving her fork at him, a slice of mushroom impaled on it.

"He's a cunt, though," Tony said, not unreasonably. He never ate much during the day, but the fast didn't extend to drinking, and he was already beginning to feel that another one would be more than welcome. "You probably have to register at least point five on the Cunt Scale to be admitted."

" _Darling._ "

"Oh, I just don't want to waste time at a bloody health farm, that's all. An hour at the massage table and then three hours at the bar. If I want to get drunk in the company of a lot of daytime television twats, I don't see why I should be charged a thousand pounds for the privilege."

"I thought it might be good for you to get some rest, that's all." Jan drained her wine glass, then replaced it on the table and raised her hands in surrender, the bracelets on her left wrist sliding downwards. "Fine! Very occasionally, I _have_ been known to worry about you, okay? Sue me!"

"You are a sweet thing," Tony said, meaning it.

"No, I just don't want to lose my bloody money!" She was smiling as she spoke, but in her eyes, shadowed with a dusky blue rather than the cobalt that all women seemed to be in love with a few years ago, concern lingered.

"Marry me. It'll be marvellous. You won't even have to suffer living in the same house."

Jan wrinkled her nose in mock deliberation. "There's not a lot of bigamy going on in Muswell Hill these days. Still, we might make the front page of the Standard, I suppose."

Tony looked up at the window. The Ivy had changed hands and been relaunched that year, but the new owners had preserved the leaded panes with their little diamonds of stained glass, the dark wood panelling, the green leather seating. Everything about its art nouveau decor shouted both 'individual' and 'upmarket', although you could easily pay more for a meal at plenty of other restaurants, and what The Ivy did serve, you praised with more of a sense of loyalty than a sharply discerning palate. That wasn't to say that the menu wasn't good, but what The Ivy thrived on was its name and reputation. Tony felt as if it ran the constant risk of being left like the Emperor in his new clothes by a diner, who might make an off the cuff remark that they had had a better shepherd's pie at Clarke's last week. Everybody had a public identity, a front to maintain in the outside world, including The Ivy.

"It would do you the world of good, you know."

"Marriage? Oh, for goodness' sakes..!"

"No." Jan shook her head, thoughtfully. "Not necessarily. Just... someone to be there for you."

Tony seldom found his genuine friendships through work; didn't, as publicity seemed to assume, spend his free time on a circular tour of the houses of the Cambridge set, but now it occurred to him that his agent, someone with whom he had been brought together in _less_ than a work relationship, in a cold, hard cash relationship, had also become his friend. _Well, maybe this business has got something worthwhile to offer after all,_ he thought, patting her hand.

"Too old, darling," he said. "Too old and too set in my own self-absorbed little ways."

Cutlery chimed gently against plates around them. Jan looked at her watch, and then sighed. "Fuck. I've got to go - I've got a meeting at four. Sorry, I should have said."

"No, no. It doesn't matter." Tony rose from his chair as she did. "I was going to go for a walk this afternoon," he said, "just down to St James's Park or something," and then thought that the gentle lie sounded not unappealing, and felt absolved of telling it.

"Gorgeous. Remind me you said that next time we have lunch, and we'll go to the restaurant. A room with a view." Jan looked up at him - only a little way, she wasn't that much shorter, or was it that he wasn't that much taller? - and the brightness of her smile dimmed so slightly that someone less perceptive would never have noticed.

"Take care of yourself," she said.

Tony was about to reply that that was what he'd always been best at doing, but when he tried to voice the words, his throat remained empty. Their gazes held for a fraction of a second, then she turned, hitching her bag higher onto her shoulder with the reflex action of someone who begins to move, and the tiny window of opportunity was gone. He was distracted from the slight sense of loss almost as soon as he was aware of it, though, by the _deja vu_ that took its place; of looking at someone that you thought you knew at least passably one day and feeling that your entire perception of them has suddenly taken a new and unfamiliar turn.

It was more than surprising, Tony thought a bit later on, that he happened to remember his last conversation with John just then, because when he had been exiting the restaurant a few minutes afterwards, he had walked straight into him.

*** *** ***

If Tony had sat down at some point in time and compiled a list of things he expected to be grateful to Kenneth Branagh for in the near future, missing a lunch appointment would certainly have been quite near the bottom. But Ken, newlywed since August, had pleaded off lunch with John at The Ivy on the compassionate grounds of Emma's mother visiting at the new house ("Is being stood up by your director a personal affront or a professional one?" John queried) and Ken's loss of a companion had become Tony's gain, although he wasn't quite sure how it happened. He and John weren't friends, and he usually found that spontaneity came as one of the joys of long-term friendship, but somehow they were walking together down Charing Cross Road because they happened to be going in the same direction, and then, as they reached and passed that point where you begin to acknowledge that you are, in fact, grateful for someone's company, down through tourist-trap London with its galleries at Trafalgar Square, its triple archway leading into the Mall.

John smoked while they sat beside the lake in St James's Park, the smoke of the reluctant; the cigarette stubbed out determinedly halfway down, followed by, a few minutes later, irritable fingers through the hair and a reach for the lighter again. "I shouldn't carry the fucking things with me," he said after several repeat performances, a trace of disgust in his voice.

"That's an extremely admirable intention. You'd just keep finding excuses to walk past places where you could buy some more, though."

"Pitiable, but true." John put the packet down on the bench between them, gesturing to it as he affected a nasal, Noel Coward tone. "Feel free to partake, dear boy. You're just in time. A cigarette, a cup of tea, and then the end of the world." He winced slightly, clearly seeing a non-existent depreciation in Tony's expression. "At least I didn't go into a voice _straight away_ that time."

"Oh, no, it's all right. I never smoke, actually; I've got an indulgent personality, but not an addictive one. Apparently there's a difference." Tony remembered sitting staring into a glass once, feeling nothing at all and wishing that he could get drunk in the way that the word 'drunk' conjures up pictures of, in the way that people get drunk on television: happy drunk, or babbling drunk, or passing out and falling on your arse drunk. "I'd quite like to be really and truly addicted to something. You don't need anything beyond that, then, do you? You live from one hit to the next."

A little breeze came off the water, whisking smoke away at an unexpected angle over their shoulders, but not strong enough to move most of the earliest fallen leaves, plastered to the concrete by the week's rain and rapidly turning into a slippery, rotting mulch. Overhead, the trees that were just starting to turn still carried the diseased rather than glowing look. Later in the month, probably, the parks would come alive again in their second blossoming of the year, this time in red and gold, and bits of London would fill people who had been born in its boroughs, like Tony, with the absurd, involuntary feeling that they really did live in the most beautiful city in the world. It was extraordinary, he thought, the way that a few trees could make or break the picture.

"I went to Canada last year," John said. "To see my sister. She got married. That's addiction - complete and terminal addiction to one other person, to the degree that you decide that you can't spend one single day without them being a part of your life; that you _can't_ live between the hits of seeing them. Utter bollocks or pure magic. I've never known which."

"Both. Terrifying, isn't it?"

"I avoid terrifying confrontations at all costs." John stubbed out another cigarette; on the slightly damp arm of the bench, it made a small mark. "Including one of the most horrible questions a human being's capable of asking." He looked at Tony, waiting for him - challenging him - to continue, as if they were improvising another game in front of the cameras. His eyes, the best aspect of features that managed to otherwise sidestep being good looking at every angle - a nose too prominent, a chin too square - were intense.

"'Shall we get a place together?'" Tony said, emphasizing the ironic quotation marks. Both he and John smiled wryly, not so much out of any amusement as from the relief that comes with realizing that, for once, you can be honest instead of nice. A silence set in between them; a comfortable one, but with, Tony felt, a certain undertone, although once again he wasn't sure whether it was simply sexual or something more complex. "Have you ever tried it?" he said, after a while.

John hesitated. "Once or twice I have had a fit of romanticism," he said, finally. "Didn't last. The other people it did last for ended up getting hurt. Friends - who should have just stayed friends."

"I'm not the slightest bit romantic, I don't think," Tony said. It was only after he'd spoken that it crossed his mind that his comment could be taken as an inviting, almost flirtatious reply. He was fairly certain that he hadn't intended it that way, but neither did he feel any particular urge to clarify himself; rather he simply let it hang, an appropriate addition to the odd camaraderie between them. "I can't remember," he said, reflectively, "ever not being able to ask someone to leave. Selfish old crap."

"'Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.'"

"Oscar Wilde?"

"Correct."

"He was married, wasn't he?" Tony propped his elbow on the arm of the bench and rested his chin on his hand. "For years and years; even had children. I wonder if she knew. Perhaps he was selfish after all."

"Safety's always a very appealing choice," John said. Between his eyebrows, as thick, if not as riotous, as the curls on his head, a small furrowed 'v' appeared, his distraction by another undisclosed train of thought visible even as he finished speaking. "Will you come and see the show next week?" he said, out of nowhere.

Tony blinked. "All right. Yes, I'd like to."

"It's not a Napoleonic _Noises Off_. It's not _safe_." John sounded defensive, almost fiercely so, although no one had made any accusations: those were surfacing from inside. "It's different and interesting as well as being funny as shit; it has to be. Or you might as well take up residence on LWT."

"Worse fates exist. If everyone stays on their toes, good quiz shows are just as valid as some terrible dross by Brecht."

John reached out and picked up his cigarettes again, not flipping the packet back open yet but simply turning it over and over in his hand. "I'm not saying they aren't valid. I just don't want to have to ignore everything else that's out there. The _possibilities_." He paused. "Every sentence in the show should shine," he said, forcefully, and then, sounding less convinced, "Even if it means having an audience of six and funding it by doing adverts the rest of the time."

"It's a bit of a schizophrenic business, isn't it? You play to a full house in the evening and tell them to drink lager and bank at Lloyds the next morning." Tony had a vague suspicion that he'd missed the point, but if he had, John chose not to elaborate.

"I don't like sharing a stage," he said. He half-smiled, as if fully aware of the obviousness of this statement. "It's irritating, having to wait for other people to finish. Somebody once said I should do stand-up; the monologues. The _acceptable_ face of egotism," he added, grimacing slightly.

"Paul seems to do well on that, doesn't he? And Ben Elton, of course."

"I can't put myself over like that, though. Never could. I'm no good at being _me_. I can tell the joke if I'm telling it as somebody else. As thirty different people, even better."

"I rather like it when you're being you, actually," Tony said. Usually he would have gone over something like this in his mind a few times and probably rephrased it, but this time, to his own surprise, he just said it, without being mindful of the potential outcome.

John opened his mouth and then closed it again. For a moment, he looked not so much awkward, as troubled, and Tony wondered why: he imagined that his comment, ridiculous as it was, should nonetheless have sounded complimentary. But then the comes-as-standard layer of grey cloud that had been slowly darkening overhead began to once again spit the first fat droplets, and they both glanced away and up at the sky.

"Do you want to go somewhere and get very pissed?" John said.


	2. Chapter 2

One of the fundamental differences that sharing a living space must make, Tony imagined, was the steady, drip-drip into your life of cause and effect, of _response_ ; the constant demand to interact that prevented you from becoming lost in your own thoughts for not just a few minutes, but for hours at a time. There was the unspoken agreement to get both in and out of bed at mutually sociable times, to change your clothes at regular intervals, to sit down and eat together, to argue about the bathroom; to, essentially, compromise. But on his own in the flat, there was no one for whom he was obliged to do any of those things, and when the natural motivation to do them for himself left him, there were no reasons that he could come up with to do anything at all.

He sat in the living room that evening, on his sofa with the red cushions that felt like velvet - but probably weren't - and the heavy mahogany arms, curved like the giant paws of some ponderous animal; one of several new pieces of furniture in a style that he had been advised would compliment the 'original period features' the flat had boasted of at the estate agent. Among these were the large Victorian fireplaces, and he stared at the one in front of him for a while, thinking that perhaps a real fire, log or coal, instead of the gas model fitted, might have contributed at least a little to the cosiness, the sense of intimacy, that the room seemed to lack. It hadn't seemed quite so obvious, Tony thought, when he moved in, and this thought made him slowly more and more aware that it wasn't the flat which was the guilty party, but himself; that through depression, he was looking at it as if in a monochrome photograph, where all the shapes are familiar, but the ambience is somehow changed.

Time was passing; he was fully conscious of that on one level, but on another he was confused - it seemed terribly accelerated, giving him little shocks each time he looked at the clock or out of the window to where the street lights had come on hours ago, and yet the day had been endlessly long. Other things were confused as well, like knowing that the best thing - the practical thing, anyway - for him now was to be on his own, and, for once, wanting not to be. He looked up again, this time at the telephone, but even as he visualized himself picking up the receiver, Tony was aware of the futility of the action. There was no one who he wanted to phone and lay that burden on; to have to say to, without warning or reason, _I want you here_.

He thought about just sleeping it off, but felt uneasy at the chance that, even with the influence of the pills sluicing thickly around inside his brain, he might dream. Instead, he found himself getting up from the sofa, and after only another short deliberation, going to fetch his coat so that he could go out for a walk.

He walked quickly for a time, with purpose; the studied _intent_ of walking, even when there was no destination. Coming through Clapham, with the common on his left and the night time traffic still travelling intermittently past on his right, he was struck by how, bathed in the same slightly dirty orange glow, the most familiar streets can seem uniform when you are not being governed and directed by road signs and red lights, and the thought bothered him that it might actually be possible to get lost. He approached a pedestrian crossing, at which several cars had just drawn to a halt, and passed it, operating, again, outside the usual rules.

Tony had gone out to escape the silence of the flat, but outside, walking, he became aware that it had simply been replaced by a greater form of silence, that of disconnection. Sounds were happening all around him, but he had no part in them. The mental dilemma of this, of trying to amalgamate the noises of London with the noise of his thoughts, intensified the feeling of the slow ebb of rationality, and he wondered, in a strangely detached way, if he was about to have some sort of panic attack.

He halted at another crossing, this one at a junction in Wandsworth, and as he finally stopped moving, a fatigue that he hadn't noticed until now seemed to wash over him from nowhere. He put his right hand into his coat pocket, purely for the sensation of having something tactile against his fingers, something to ground him. Instead, with another emotion, that of surprise, he found that there was something inside; paper. He took it out, and looked at it, blankly, for a moment, unable to remember why he would have a folded up piece of newspaper in his pocket. And then, in the same instant as it came to him that he had been wearing this coat the last time that he went in to the studio to do a _Whose Line_ taping, two more thoughts entered his head, the second being the logical, and, indeed, _only_ course of action that could possibly follow the first. He crossed the road and walked another five hundred yards, and when he next heard his own voice, speaking to the driver of the solitary taxi that he had flagged down, he wasn't giving his own address, but the one written on the strip of _Guardian_ he was still holding in his hand.

*** *** ***

Tony knew that there had to be a dozen ways to explain to someone that you don't really know all that well why you're standing, unannounced, on their doorstep at half past eleven at night. Indeed, suggestions had been turning over in his head during the short taxi ride, because after he had made the decision to go, he had realized that he would therefore soon have to _arrive_ ; that his actions would lead to a consequence. Quite how he would word those first few sentences, though, he had left a deliberate blur; something that would all somehow, miraculously, come together in the end, like stepping out in front of an improvisation audience. So as he stood at the upstairs entrance of the third in the small row of whitewashed buildings, with John holding the door open in front of him, he just opened his mouth to speak, thinking how after he'd imagined it taking such an effort, it was going to be terribly easy, after all.

And he couldn't come up with a single thing to say, except, "I thought I'd come and return your book, but I forgot it."

John looked somewhat lost. "You forgot it," he repeated, as if he was, generously, giving Tony the opportunity to articulate himself. "You realized you'd forgotten it just now, or twenty minutes after you left the house?"

"Actually, I sort of realized it before I left the house," Tony said. He watched John's expression change from confusion to incomprehension, and, as he did so, an image began to gradually form in his mind's eye; an image of what the two of them - particularly himself - would look like to an observer standing a little way off. _Stupid,_ was the plain and simple answer that came to him, and it seemed so stunning, so ludicrous after the past few hours, that he felt the corners of his mouth starting to twitch, threatening not healthy laughter, but hysterics. He shivered, more a jangle of his nerve endings than a reaction to any cold.

"Are you all right?" John said.

Tony shook his head. "No," he said, truthfully, "I don't think I am, really."

Sometime afterwards, in the small, book-strewn living room, he found himself waiting on a sofa again, except that now, he felt better for being able to function in linear time once again; waiting, as it were, for specific points in time, for _events_ \- in this case that of John returning with drinks. The world seemed a solid thing once again, if a little surreal. 'Book-strewn' is usually the sort of description that you come across in articles written for Sunday colour supplements, but here, it was, in fact, true; numerous volumes seemed to stand, lay flat, and perform admirable balancing acts on almost every available shelf. Oddly, they gave no suggestion of laxity or untidiness on their owner's part, but rather, if anything, a sense of urgency, that each one had only recently been the centre of attention. On the opposite wall, prosaically magnolia-coloured, a framed watercolour hung; an impressionistic view of water, hills and towering banks of cloud that reminded Tony a bit of what he could remember of the Lake District from the one weekend he'd spent there with his girlfriend while he was at Cambridge, although most of his memories of that weekend seemed to consist of laying, stoned and giggling, in a leaky tent. In spite of how that relationship had ended, he expected to feel at least a twinge of nostalgia, even of bleak amusement after all this time, at the memory of what had been, after all, his one solitary engagement, but there was nothing. Tonight, he even had difficulty picturing her face clearly, let alone remembering what he thought he had felt at one time when he looked at it. He found himself wondering, almost interestedly, if a man could be an island after all.

He was distracted from his thoughts by the awareness that John was standing beside him, holding out a tumbler of vodka. He looked up as he took his drink, noticing properly for the first time the fact that the other man was fully dressed.

"I didn't get you out of bed, then," he said.

Another indecipherable look passed across John's face. "I couldn't sleep." With the hand that wasn't holding his own glass, he indicated vaguely the small plethora of A4 pads on a nearby table, covered with notes and crossings-out, all in longhand. "If I can't sleep, I just piss around on paper until I'm exhausted. It doesn't seem to be working tonight, though," he finished.

Tony felt strongly awareness of his intrusiveness, perhaps because he was being exactly what he so loathed other people being to him: an uninvited guest. It was much easier to be the visitor, he thought; then you always had the option of initiating the end of the evening.

"You know, if I'm being a nuisance..." he began, but John interrupted him, sharply.

" _No_." And then, in a lower, more tired voice, his lingering Scots accent more noticeable than usual, "No. It's not you, it's me. Or it's just -"

"Premature opening night nerves?"

John stared at him for a moment. Then a short laugh, little more than a heavy exhalation, forced itself out, and he sank down on the far cushion. "That's very funny," he said, lifting his vodka to his mouth, and only pausing briefly before taking a long drink. "Extremely funny, because that's what it is, the whole thing. Exactly what it is. Doubt. Lack of confidence. This _worry_ of..." he swirled the liquid around before taking the last mouthful, "...not having made career choices, but just a long series of big fucking mistakes."

He broke off, shaking his head. "God, listen. You too can sound like a pretentious wanker and then crawl up your own backside. Look," he said, abruptly, "Tony -" bringing, by the use of a name, a new weight of purpose to the conversation, "if you wanted to talk tonight - I wouldn't object to the company all that much."

Tony contemplated this for a short time. He drained his glass, and held it, circling the rim thoughtfully with his middle finger, and as he looked back at John, something seemed to move within him: not quite affection, yet more than simple gratitude; a sense of... empathy. He realized, with faint surprise, that it wasn't something that he experienced very often, with either friends or partners, but it seemed to come perfectly naturally now; just one more aspect of this confused evening. It felt comfortable, for want of a better description, although not in the way that the word is normally used, to suggest the general _absence_ of any kind of excitement - more, in fact, the opposite.

He wanted, he felt, more than conversation.

"Well, it depends, doesn't it?" he said.

"On what?"

"On whether or not you only want to talk."

A little of the lost look returned, and John's brow knitted. "Sorry - I don't -"

Tony found a small table beside his end of the sofa, and put his empty glass down on it. "How much do you fancy me?" he said.

John's expression didn't twist, as other people's might have done, into disbelief or hasty denial; it was as if, from the beginning, he knew there was no point. Without replying, he stood, picking up the bottle of Smirnoff from the sideboard, where it was standing beside _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ and marginally failing to conceal a creased paperback of _A Perfect Spy_. He poured a generous measure into his own glass.

"Another one?" he said.

"I don't have to be drunk to do this," Tony said. "I won't consider it an insult if you do, though."

John put the bottle down, heavily, but remained facing the wall, only the slight stiffness in the line of his back betraying him. Tony got up, navigating the furniture to stand behind him. He assumed that the creak of the floorboards must give his presence away, but still John didn't turn round. "You haven't answered the question yet," he said, placidly.

"Tony -"

"How much?"

"Not enough." And then, "No - I just don't _want_ it to be enough. Maybe I don't want to have to think about why it feels like it would be _so fucking easy_ to do."

"I don't think this has to be complicated." Tony paused; it occurred to him that he could have crossed the thin line and made an irreparable mistake, but he didn't think so. "Do you want me to leave?" he said.

"No. Don't."

"It isn't complicated, then."

John turned. His hair, as dark as Tony's own, looked even blacker under the yellowish domestic light, and suddenly touchable in its dense disordered curls, and the outline of him was tangible beneath the untucked, but neatly ironed shirt he was wearing; the juxtaposed hardness and softness of another man both familiar and intoxicating. Tony placed his hand on his forearm. John hesitated for a moment, then he seemed to sag a little, all the resistance going out of him, leaving a rawness and nakedness in his face, and he covered it with his own.

"Let's go to bed," Tony said.

*** *** ***

Nobody ever loses themselves entirely for more than a second at a time during sex; ever really forgets how they got there, or what they'll be doing afterwards, or stops being aware of their surroundings or their partner in the most distracting detail. Nor did Tony, in this exact same way, ever find himself _wanting_ to stop being aware or being unable to fully experience each detail as it arose: the scratchy cleanness of the duvet cover and the sheet beneath it; the sudden tension that sprang into John's shoulders and the way that his teeth drove into his lower lip when their nakedness came into contact for the first time; his own weight, palpable even to himself in his position on top, astride the other man's lap. The details themselves became a source of excitement, as if the _reality_ of what was happening was satisfying a need that he hadn't known had been so acute tonight.

John's hands barely stopped moving, as if he couldn't help touching, was completely absorbed in this opportunity to touch; massaging shapes into Tony's hips, his back, his upper arms; curving around his neck, cupping his jaw. He only broke away to fumble in the bedside drawer, catching up a printed blister pack along with the familiar Durex box by mistake on his first attempt; Tony found, on some separate level, his pharmacological interest automatically noting the brand name and categorizing it: a tranquilizer rather than a sedative. His body hair was slightly sparser than Tony's own, but pleasantly rough when Tony placed his palms, each of his fingers slightly outstretched, on John's chest and leaned forward; slid, in the heat of their sweat, against him. It was that, more than anything, that he kept coming back to; the warmth of skin on skin, the reassurance of contact. John's grasp on his thighs, when Tony finally steadied him in his hand and bore down to ease him into his own lubricated flesh, was hard enough to leave finger-bruises.

It rained again later, somewhere around two in the morning; a small torrent that Tony could hear running over the edges of the guttering. He cricked his neck, lifting his head slightly from the pillow to better hear it, and John, his back pressed against Tony's chest, felt the movement and shifted.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing. It's raining, that's all." Much as he might enjoy their presence in other ways, Tony often had difficulty obtaining any genuine rest with someone else in the bed, sometimes quietly resorting to a pill to knock him out after an hour or two of listening to their tossing and turning and the changing rhythms of their breathing, but tonight, he felt unusually at ease. He curled his body around John's a little more, the couple of inches of their difference in height tessellating them together, and draped his right arm over him to rest his hand lightly against his abdomen. "Can you sleep now?" he said.

John made a non-committal sound, but it was edged with drowsiness. His fingers wandered across Tony's, brailling him absently in the darkness. After a while, he said, "What are you doing here? I mean - why did you want to come round here tonight? You hardly know me."

"Well, perhaps I wanted to." John didn't say anything. Tony rested his chin, lightly, on his shoulder. "Perhaps I thought that we already understand quite a lot about each other, really."

They lay quietly for a time, each alone with their thoughts. Then John said, "I've got to leave early tomorrow morning. I'll put the spare key on the sideboard. Post it back through the door when you go."

"All right," Tony said, and it was. He didn't miss the suggestion in the words - that John didn't want to find him still here when he came home; that that would be an implication, by default, of something between them that didn't exist - but that was all right too. Somewhere else, and with another person, he might have decided at this point to begin the gradual process of seduction again, on the principle of simply making the most of the time he had left. But he felt no real urge to do it tonight, as if where they were now had been the goal and sex merely a precursor.

He fell asleep like that, thinking about it, as he listened to the downpour outside; not a funereal sound now, but a restful one, splashing off the wide sill beneath the window and leaving the night clean.


End file.
